Hooperian Persiflage?

The essay in Present Concerns titled “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought” is suspicious in several ways. One is its view of women. The writer laments the intellectual and spiritual damage done to men by “The Emancipation of Women.” He says the proper glory of the masculine mind is disinterested concern with truth for truth’s own sake and the cosmic and metaphysical. The emancipation of women cuts men off from the eternal and forces them down to the immediate and the quotidian.

The following sentence about the social mingling of men and women is one of the essay’s assorted peculiarities. “Any mixed [male/female] society thus becomes the scene of wit, banter, persiflage, anecdote — of everything in the world rather than prolonged and rigorous discussion on ultimate issues, or of those serious masculine friendships in which such discussion arises.”

Persiflage is a rather pretentious synonym for the word banter, which precedes it, a stilted redundancy unlike Lewis’s usual style. Another suspicious aspect of this sentence is the fact that the word persiflage occurs nowhere else in Lewis’s writing.

Furthermore, this sentence includes a structural error that destroys its meaning and renders it illogical. This error is easiest to see in an old-fashioned sentence diagram, but it can also be explained as follows.

“Mixed society” is the subject, and “becomes the scene” is the predicate. Two prepositional phrases obviously modify scenes: (1) of wit, etc., and (2) of everything in the world. The latter phrase is modified by the nine-word phrase beginning “rather than.” At that point the writer became confused and ended with a ten-word prepositional phrase that modifies scene, beginning with “of those serious masculine friendships.”

Thus the writer inadvertently claims that mixed society produces rather than prohibits serious male friendships. Any mixed society becomes a scene

1. of wit, banter, etc.
2. of everything in the world
3. of serious masculine friendships